Telephones are ubiquitous throughout modem societies. Residential and business buildings all connect to telephone services. The backbone of telephone networks and customer premises wiring is the twisted pair phone line. Although the twisted pair has been utilized for a very long time, new uses are emerging to piggyback better services on top of the standard analog phone data. One of these trends is the digital subscriber line (DSL). DSL allows for very fast data transfer over a twisted pair concurrently with analog phone traffic.
Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone services have also become popular in recent years. VoIP utilizes network data packets from high speed Internet provider networks, such as DSL, to transfer real time voice data from one network location to another. One issue with VoIP telephone services is that since they utilize computing devices connected to the Internet to transmit the voice data, the sending and receiving devices for the service is generally near a home computer and not necessarily near the standard analog home phone jacks.